MLK- installation (framed prints, video)
Re-coding the Dream by Gary Younge
There is a rhythm to Martin Luther King’s oratory that is both unmistakeable and unrivalled: a blend of utopian vision, biblical reference and mobilising force that takes what is best from a preacher’s timbre and adds it to a politician’s strategy. This is particularly true of his most famous speech that ends with the “I have a dream” refrain delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Only a fool would tamper with it.
Donald Harding decides not to tamper with it but do away with it altogether. In his video artwork, MLK, shown at the TRANSCODE exhibition he substitutes King’s words with music. But not just any music. Literally the music of his words. Leaving the visual account of the speech intact Harding re-codes the audio of the speech into a musical instrument digital interface file and then renders the data into a musical score arranged for eight stringed instruments from violin to double bass.
The result is at one and the same time disturbing, searing and beautiful. For he takes something we think we know and renders it into another dimension. King’s lips move but music comes out. And not the kind of music a librarian might gather – Billie Holiday and the more spirited Gospels – but orchestral movements. King’s cadence, lilt, inflection and intonation rendered unfamiliar and yet, when matched with the footage, entirely recognisable. One of history’s most mediated events translated into another media and then left, not to speak for itself.
For MLK, Harding takes Martin Luther King Jr.’s epoch-defining I Have a Dream speech and, leaving the images well enough alone, concentrates his manipulation on the original locus of meaning, the words. Subjecting the audio to a series of processes, Harding renders King’s hallowed words into music, creating an avant-garde audio work of astonishing depth and intonation.
Harding transforms every word of King’s seventeen minute speech from digital audio file into a series of MIDI bloops and bleeps, which are then arranged into a ethereal musical score performed by a string octet. A mouth which once uttered words of eternal hope and freedom from oppression, is now eliciting a beautiful chamber soliloquy. The framed display of Harding’s musical scores only strengthens what is an intriguing, moving and quite brilliant piece of work.
The positioning of MLK within a former house of worship (now reinvigorated as an art gallery), provides another interesting facet to Harding’s piece. The subtle excommunication of the space and the placement of the work, elevated at one end of the main room (the pulpit), perhaps demonstrates a strange kind of victory of art over religion, but also a sense that where religion once held sway as the only medium truly qualified to carry emotion, it has been undermined (just as many religious figures feared, and continue to fear) by music, art and the moving image.